Speranza
The writer Hans von
Wolzogen was a central figure in late 19th century and early 20th century
Bayreuth.
His interpretations of Parsifal and other Wagnerian dramas were
influential in the early reception of these works and his influence remains
detectable in much that has been written about them since.
The following
extracts have been taken from the introduction to his Thematic Guide to the
Music of Parsifal (in the English translation by J.H. Cornell, 1891).
Here
Wolzogen first provides a summary of his view of the relation of Wagner's dramas
to Indo-European traditions that predate and underlie the medieval romances.
Then he examines central elements of Wagner's drama in relation to those
medieval sources that Wolzogen considered relevant. It should be noted that his
account is not free from factual error, nor does it always agree with the
analysis of contemporary writers such as Jessie Weston. It might be argued that
Wolzogen's interpretation of Wagner's Parsifal tells us little more about the
drama than we might gain from a superficial reading of Wagner's poem -- but
rather more about the reception of Parsifal in its earliest decades and well
into the 20th century.
Wolzogen was originally invited to Bayreuth to become
the editor of a journal,
The Bayreuther Blätter
-- which Wagner intended to
provide a forum in which the Festival patrons (the Patronatverein) could discuss
Wagner's ideas about art and society.
This journal became Wolzogen's life's
work; it ceased publication as soon as its editor died, in 1938.
When it was
founded in 1878, the poem of Parsifal was newly published and the music yet
unheard.
The new drama was at once a topic discussed in the Blätter, to which
Wolzogen contributed many articles himself.
The most significant among his early
articles is the five-part series, Zur Kritik des 'Parsifal', in the 1881 issues
of the journal.
Those who have
criticised Richard Wagner's dramas have for the most part made the mistake of
measuring them, because they treated of ancient German or medieval legendary
materials, according to the standard of already existing Teutonic poems based on
materials of the same kind.
For Tristan, the epic of Godfrey of Strassburg
afforded the standard; for The Ring of the Nibelungen, the Nibelungenlied.
Those
who had perceived that Wagner's Nibelung-poem has but little in common with the
Nibelungenlied brought forward instead the Edda-songs and treated the new drama
as a dramatization of those ancient skaldic poems; which brought upon our poet
the reproach of having forsaken German soil to gather his materials in the
foreign soil of Iceland.
All this is erroneous and very foolish.
Wagner's
"materials", to indicate them thus briefly, are far more ancient than the
Skaldic settings of ancient dogmatic and legendary memory in the Northern
country, which have been handed down to us only confused and dismembered; to say
nothing of the epical compilations by the knightly and commoner singers of the
13th century in Germany.
Their characteristic features were brought over from
Asia with the Aryan nomadic peoples, and from that time have become, in ever new
transformations and condensations, the acquired possession, in the strict sense,
of the Germanic, especially of the German nation. For while the Edda-songs, in
so far as they treat of the Siegfried-myth, are demonstrably based upon elements
brought over from Germany itself, Keltic-French mythical formations, like those
of Tristan and of Parsifal, have, on the other hand, attained in German poesy
alone to the consummate, ethical realization of the universally-human material
hidden in them, and thus have become the property of the German
nation.
riginally, however, the entire legendary material distributed among
the peoples of Western Europe was essentially Aryan-Germanic property; and every
German poet who again laid hold of it, as of a primitive form of poetical fancy
peculiar to our national spirit, sought only to give us this property afresh and
to make it so much the more sincerely our own. What he created for us with it,
when he was really successful with it, was then not only a new independent form
of the old material but at the same time a new enlargement and interpretation of
the intellectual and moral subject-matter. Both of these depended, however, upon
the special tendencies of the new poet, upon the peculiarity of his art-tendency
and art-form, and this peculiarity, again, was determined by the period in which
he poetized. The medieval singer created medieval epics only; and no other
period would have allowed itself to think of such a thing as to touch these
finished art-works, the expression of another epoch, with a view to modifying
them. It was therefore folly to imagine, that, after having recast into dramatic
form the material peculiarly shaped in those epics, one had satisfied the modern
taste and had created a real Tristan- or Nibelungen-drama for the public of
today. This public was justified in withholding its sympathy from such literary
sleights- of-hand.
It is not in the outward change of form, nor in the simple
adoption of the subject-matter shaped in the best poetical setting, that a new
realization of the ancient material must consist. In fact, this material must be
daily conquered anew; and it is such a conquest that Wagner achieved when he
poetized anew the materials for the form of the new musical drama, and for the
participation of an age filled with enthusiasm through this species of art. The
universally-human fundamental essence of this multifariously transformed world
of legends had, as by every true poet, first of all to be again clearly
segregated and put in relief. But after that it had to be shaped and developed
in that manner that, in the first place, was conformable to the national spirit
that had in the mean time continued to display itself in its own way, to its
knowledge and its contemplation of the world, -- and secondly, that corresponded
to precisely this art- form which, begotten of the same spirit, was destined to
provide for it a truthful and refined expression.
With this view the singer of
the Nibelungenlied once poetized that ancient legendary material, as far as the
poetic knowledge of that day had supplied him with it, according to the needs of
the epic of that time, and with the power and in the peculiar method of the
Christian-German spirit of the period, into an entirely definite new form. But
the farther the national spirit evolved itself from its former historical
incrustations, so much the nearer was it able to come again to the
universally-human nucleus of the material, and therewith to the possibility of a
truly styleful art. That which lives in this spirit today, first of all as
actual German nature, then as feeling of existence sympathetically turned toward
the universally-human, lastly as artistically- idealistic outline, all this
concentrated itself in the artistic personality of a tragic poet whose creative
breath was music; -- and this personality again put the import of the national
spirit thus continually moulded, into the corresponding reorganized form of the
ancient national materials.
Precisely because of the fact that music, as
the new and most highly developed artistic mode of expression of the true German
nature, had been bestowed on him as his own mother tongue, Wagner was enabled to
cause these materials even of our most modern time to come again to life in that
thrilling manner which we experience in its effects upon the auditors at every
good performance of his works.
The sublime ideality of these materials allowed
them to take as the basis of their imaginary formations not only that heathen
mythological world to which they originally belonged -- to wit, the heroic
images of the poetizing national mind of the ancient Germans themselves -- but
also the realm of the sublimest ideal of the Christian religion, as it appears
symbolized in the Grail. But the possibility of realizing this ideality would
have to be denied to us, as it was in part denied to the Nibelung-singer of the
Hohenstaufen-period, who poetized with word only, if we had not music, extending
from Bach to Beethoven.
This German music elaborates, in its sphere, even the
ideal most estranged from us into a new familiar and sublime truthfulness. In
the musical drama the gods of former times are vivified as magnificent types of
those passions and thoughts which are the fundamental bearers of the entire
poetic material itself; and the celestially rapt sublimity of the Christian idea
of God, as deposited in the tradition of the Grail, is also vivified in the
musical drama, ever since Wolfram von Eschenbach has been inseparable from the
material of "Parsifal".
Not as if Wolfram had first poetized the religious
spirit into the legend -- the connection of the heroic Parsifal-legend with the
religious Grail-legend existed already before him and had been fully turned to
account in the poem of the Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes.
But in Wolfram's case
the spirit of the Grail-legend penetrated the entire poem with a solemnity and a
profoundness which, indeed, rendered the whole significance of the connection of
both legends recognizable.
But again, precisely Wolfram's conception is by no
means the standard for all time since it also decidedly bears the stamp of his
own epoch.
His knightly order of the Grail is an ecclesia militans in the full
brilliancy of medieval chivalry, his Christian spirit is the spirit of the
Church of his time, although attained, in the mind of a genial poet, to
individually poetic power.
One who, poetizing after Wolfram's time, should newly
arrange the ancient material, would have no right to separate Parsifal again
from the Grail.
He, too, would have to represent in the Grail the sum total of
the most profound religiousness which can arrive at perfect development in a
genuine Christian mind of our time on condition of enlightened intellectual
powers.
That which, in the sense of the religious ideal thereby indicated, was
to be utilized, out of Wolfram's poetry or out of any other traces and
conceptions of the ancient material, for the new musical drama, was fitted
together in the mind of the poet Wagner for the structure of his religious
tragedy, now quite freely wrought out from the idea, and named, festival play
for inaugurating a theatre (Bühnenweihfestspiel).
We shall add here a brief
examination of these separate portions of the legend, especially as they had to
form also the basal features of the musical performance of the poem, which are
to be discussed in this work.
The Grail refers to those sacred vessels in the most ancient legends
of the Aryan peoples, in which the latter sheltered the divine beverage, the
intoxicating result of ancient work of cultivation, the spiritualized product of
nature. In the soma, haoma, wine, mead, they believed that they themselves
partook of the divine nature, and that in drinking they received the divinity
within themselves. Interior exaltation, purification, invigoration for the
service of the divinity, united the participants in a mysteriously consecrated
brotherhood.
Thus especially in Eleusis, where Demeter (Ceres) and Dionysius
(Bacchus) were partaken of in bread (sesam) and wine (kykeon).
It is the
prototype of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist.
The Gael of the British
Isles also knew the sacred cauldron of Ceridwen, their Ceres = Demeter; in a far
later, post-Christian legend it appears as a dish, in which a bloody head is
lying.
The blood of the god (as of the lacerated Dionysius Zagreus of the
Greeks) assumed here in the North that materialized image for which the legend
of John the Baptist might have served as model.
This legend, related in the
so-called Mabinogi (manuscript of the 14th century), is, however, that of
"Peredur", which exactly corresponds with the story of the French Perceval.
Whether it be of Gaelic or French origin is indifferent.
At all events, it is in
France that the designation Grail and the story of this sacred vessel as of the
dish at Christ's last supper first make their appearance.
Concerning this a
narration after more ancient sources is given by Robert de Boron in the Petit
St. Graal (12th century).
This chalice of the Last Supper, with the paten, was
given by the Saviour to Joseph of Arimathea, who had also collected in it the
blood of the Crucified One, as a sacred inheritance, to prolong his life in
prison until Tito set him free and received baptism at his hands.
Here we find
in "Tito" the first trace of the guardian of the Grail, "TITurel, who makes
his appearance later on.
Chrétien de Troyes (d. 1190) also has this sacred
vessel of the Grail in his Perceval le Galois or Contes de Graal, and, indeed,
as a healing, nourishing, purifying miracle from Joseph's legacy to the kindred
of Perceval.
In Wolfram, who poetized about 1210 in imitation of Chrétien,
suddenly appears in the place of the vessel a stone, brought by an angelic host
down to earth and placed under the care of the "Templists", the pious chivalry
of TITurel on Monsalvat, the "Mountain of Salvation", inaccessible to sinners.
Every Good Friday strengthened in its miraculous power by means of the wafer of
the DOVE from heaven, this Grail of Wolfram's, a revelation of the divine
essence itself, has likewise an express bearing upon the Last Supper and the
death of Christ.
Wolfram asserts that he received the knowledge of this stone,
which points to oriental Sabianism1, from a poet named Kiot, after the statement
of a Spanish-Arabian half-Jew Flegetanis (i.e. in Arabic, astronomer). In Spain,
where formerly the Gothic Christians, under Pelayo, had retreated before the
heathen Moors with the sanctuary of their pure faith into the mountains of the
North, there, indeed, history afforded an especially significant prototype
for:
The Knightly Order of the Grail represents the antique
community of mysteries, the consecrated brotherhood, in the ideal form of a
medieval order of spiritual knights. The knights are called, in Wolfram's poem,
Templeisen, and exhibit traits in common with the Knights Templars, among whom,
moreover, the head on a dish was also to be found, as object of worship, as in
the Gaelic legend.
They were also powerfully represented precisely in Northern
Spain as the successors of the Gothic conquerors of the heathen.
Wolfram's
"Templists" are nourished and strengthened by means of the Grail; from afar they
hear the cry for help of the suffering, and march out into the world to the
defence of innocence and the punishment of wrongdoing. The names of the chosen
ones appear on the Grail. They are the knightly embodiment of the divine love in
earthly heroism. As a tragically significant symbol of their chivalrousness,
there appears with them, besides the divine Grail, in all relevant
traditions:
The Bloody Spear the Mabinogi does not know it as a Christian
relic.
On the other hand, Chrétien de Troyes, without ceremony, indicates it as
the spear of Longino which pierced the side of the crucified Saviour.
In
Wolfram's poem this signification has again disappeared; the bleeding spear
which the company of the Grail salute with loud lamentations, as it is being
carried around in the hall, is there a poisoned weapon, which, in the hand of
some heathen or other, who strove with the knights for the acquisition of the
Grail, inflicted on the king of the Grail, Amfortas, Titurel's successor, an
incurable wound on the occasion of a love-adventure.
This Amfortas is The
Infirm King whose form is likewise common to all the relevant traditions. In
the Mabinogi he appears as a lame old man, Peredur's uncle; but his sickness has
but slight relation to the action; the spear and the bloody head are there
referred to the murdered father of Peredur, and the mission of the hero is
vengeance for his father's death. With Chrétien the infirm king (le roi pécheur,
-- fisher and sinner) is the king of the Grail, and with Wolfram the name
Amfortas, i.e. the weak and suffering one, is added, but near him the "old man",
his ancestor Titurel, is also seen in the castle of the Grail, on a couch. The
figure of Amfortas represents an affliction that has obtruded itself upon the
association of the Grail, and that was founded, indeed, upon guilt. The guilt is
sensuality, transgression of a fundamental law of the holy order; the punishment
emanates from the spirit of paganism, which itself embodies sinful sensuality.
The cure is said, in both conceptions, to be be effected through a promised
knight who is to come and "inquire". This knight is the hero of the
Parsifal-legend connected with the legend of the Grail:
Peredur - Perceval -
Parzival - Parsifal
He is a counterpart of Lohengrin, inasmuch as we recognise
in the latter the consecrated knight of the Grail going forth on an errand of
deliverance, while Parsifal is he who only seeks and inquires after the Grail --
or who does not inquire after it and goes astray.
The Grail, hidden from every
sinner and heathen, is the supreme object of the ideal aspiration of the pious
knightly mind; it is even the (religious) ideal sought for in the battle of
life, revealed in the death of Christ, represented and imparted for the faith in
this sacrament.
The Gaelic name "Peredur" is elucidated through Pergedur, which is
said to signify the "seeker after the basin".
The hero could, however, become
seeker after the Grail on French soil only.
To interpret also the name
"Parzifal" in the same manner from the Gaelic
"Per-kyfaill"
was therefore more
hazardous than Görres' derivation from the Arabic "Parsch-fal", i.e. the
innocent fool.
As such, first of all, the seeking hero makes his appearance in
all the legends.
It is innocence and simplicity which merited the vocation to
the supreme act of redemption.
The story of the infancy of the hero Percival perfectly
agrees in the Mabinogi with the later accounts in Chrétien4 and Wolfram.
Fatherless, brought up by his mother far from the world, the ignorant child of
the forest is decoyed into the world by means of a brilliant pageant of
chivalry.
According to Chrétien he issues forth in rustic attire.
According to
Wolfram in harlequin's dress: the latter calls him the "tumbe klare", thus
likewise "innocent fool", and regards him as descended from the lineage of
Anjou, as the son of Gamuret and Herzeloyde.
In the Mabinogi he arrives, after
divers absurd adventures, at that castle of his lame uncle, where, however, he
does not inquire as to the signification of the spear and the bloody head.
According to Chrétien and Wolfram, it is the castle of the Grail, where he has
been before announced to the Grail as that one who by his inquiry shall heal the
infirm king.
Still, the fool does not inquire.
He enters anew into the world,
intent upon knightly adventures.
Here the curse befalls him on account of his
neglect; in the Mabinogi, by means of a fierce black-haired maiden, called,
according to Chrétien, la demoiselle; according to Wolfram, Kondrie la sorcière,
the witch, and yet messenger of the Grail also.
He must now wander and seek
until he again finds the "Wonder-castle".
He meets everywhere5 the clergyman or
the penitent knight, who rebukes him for bearing weapons on Good Friday. To this
is joined the instruction concerning the Grail by the knightly hermit, in
Chrétien and Wolfram.
In the Mabinogi also a hermit is the host of Peredur; his
figure is divided6, in Chrétien and Wolfram, into an earlier teacher of knightly
virtues (Gurnemans) and that later instructor as to the Grail. At last the
seeker finds the castle; in the Mabinogi he avenges his father, in Chrétien he
makes a broken sword whole again7, and heals the king by inquiring after spear
and Grail; and in Wolfram by the question: What ails thee, uncle?
He becomes
king in his stead.
Wagner's Parsifal unites in his simple story all these principal features
of the legendary material.
He, too, is the innocent fool, Gamuret's and
Herzeleide's son, born fatherless, enticed from the forest into the world by the
appearance of the knights.
In ignorance and with the foolish act of the
slaughter of an animal, he sets foot upon the realm of the Grail.
There the
affliction of the king Amfortas has been brought on by a combat with the
representative of paganism, Klingsor (the famous magician of German legend).
And, indeed, this befell him likewise on the occasion of a love-adventure.
The
lance is the holy spear of Longinus; the king entered into the combat with this
holy relic; Kundry, who was under Klingsor's jurisdiction, allured him within
her arms; the spear was taken from him by Klingsor and he himself was wounded by
it.
Only the touch of the spear (which in Wolfram also "cools" the wound) can
heal the king.
But only the "innocent fool" who is promised through the writing
on the Grail can retrieve the spear from Klingsor's hand, in that he preserves
his purity amid the danger of sensual allurement.
This can be the case only in
virtue of consciousness of the guilt of Amfortas.
And this consciousness is
acquired only through deepest sympathy with the sufferer.
Hence the motto on the
Grail runs thus:
By pity [en]lightened, the guileless fool -- Wait for him,
my chosen tool.
Thus the epic moment of inquiring becomes a dramatic
motive.
The question in the abstract is, strictly speaking, superfluous in
Wolfram, because Parzival, when he inquires, has already learned that after
which he is inquiring.
It denotes, however, in a manner so as to make epically
present, the feeling of sympathy with the king and thus symbolizes a necessary
act of sympathy on the part of the hero.
Now, this act of sympathy is, in
Wagner's poem, quite dramatically, the acquisition of the spear.
Thus, instead
of the merely symbolically-epic and scenically ineffective formula of the
inquiry, the main point with him is the actual touching of the wound with the
reconquered spear as the act of redemption of the sympathy which has become
conscious.
Gurnemanz, the armourer of the holy order of knights, in whose figure
the epically separated personages of the hermit and the knight are dramatically
reunited, thinks that he has found in the fool, who has miraculously come into
the territory of the Grail, the Promised One, and conducts him into the castle,
to the love-feast; but although deeply affected by an unknown sorrow, Parsifal
does not yet understand the affliction of Amfortas.
He is again sent forth into
the world of fools and wicked ones, and now comes into the domain of seduction,
into the enchanted garden of Klingsor.
But in the very arms of Kundry he resists
the temptation, since the recollection of the sorrows of Amfortas now, in a like
occurrence, awakens in him to the full consciousness of their guilty
signification.
Having become conscious in actual fellowship of suffering, he
regains the spear from the annihilated power of the pagan sensual charm.
Yet
Kundry's curse sends him upon a long pilgrimage; the innocent one must, amid
fierce struggles, by his own strength preserve the sacred thing that he has
acquired, the cognizance of guilt and of suffering, in the dangers and enmities
of the world, and by deeds confirm them; then only shall he find the way back to
the Grail. On Good Friday he sets foot upon the holy domain, he must lay aside
the secular knightly weapons on the day of redemption, and with the divinely
consecrated and expiated weapon he closes up the wound of sin in the house of
salvation, freed from affliction. He becomes king in the stead of
Amfortas.
The Grail in Wagner's Poem appears, as does also the spear, in
its full Christian-religious meaning.
Both symbols have, like the stone in
Wolfram, been transmitted from heaven by a multitude of angels to Titurel, who
has built for them the sanctuary which no sinner finds in the North-Spanish
mountains, the ancient asylum of the pure faith. With this agrees also the
statement of Wolfram's successor, Albrecht von Scharffenberg the poet of the
so-called jüngeren Titurel (1270); but if with him everything appears epically
blazoned forth for the delineation of knightly splendour, with Wagner everything
is kept within, religiously absorbed, entirely pervaded as it were by the spirit
of the most Christian sacrament, the Lord's Supper, the Divine Sacrifice. This
is denoted by the visible participation of the community of the holy and pure in
the solemn fruition of God, i.e. in the interpenetration of their own blood and
body with the Divine, for carrying out the spirit of heavenly love in earthly
deeds of sympathy with innocence and right. In the sin-wound of Amfortas,
however, the Saviour himself suffers, the spirit of divine love given up in
human care to the world of sin. Nevertheless, the same divine power of conscious
sympathy delivers him from the suffering of human guilt, and brings redemption
to the Redeemer8.
With this enhancement of the legend, which on the one
hand led back to the most ancient signification of the mystery of the sacred
vessel, and on the other hand rendered an ideal conception of the pure Christian
notion of the redemption feasible, only paganism itself could step forward as
dramatic antithesis to the Christendom embodied in the worship of the Grail, as
it had, indeed, been foreshadowed in the previous legendary formations but,
precisely in the great epic poems of chivalry, had not been carried out. Rather,
the epic of chivalry, in opposition to the Grail, as to the life of religious
knighthood, represented the life of secular knighthood in the famous Round Table
of King Arthur. In all relevant legendary poems, from the Mabinogi onward,
Parsifal makes his appearance at the court of Arthur. Wolfram has conceived the
antithesis still more profoundly; for it is at the court of Arthur, in the
utmost worldly splendour of chivalry, that the curse of the messenger of the
Grail falls upon the hero; but it is at the court of Arthur that she also
announces to him, upon his returning penitent, the release from the curse. This
court of Arthur, a specifically medieval fantasy picture, was in no wise to be
any longer made use of for the religious drama of our time; its whole character
is that of the epic of chivalry, which lives upon the exuberant, adventurous
spirit of the Arthurian knights, even with Wolfram, although its insertion into
the intimate alliance of the legends of the Grail and of Parsifal was in the
beginning only a heterogeneously external makeshift of the epic, craving
material. The true antithesis to the castle of the Grail is found in the châtel
merveil, the enchanted castle of the pagan Klingsor, which in Wolfram comes to
the surface by way of episode only. In Wolfram, the master of the enchanted
mirror, of the enchanted forest and of the four hundred captive
virgins,
Klingsor in Wagner is identified with that pagan with whom
paganism actually encroaches upon the action of the legend, that is to say, with
Wolfram's unnamed antagonist of the Grail, whose spear inflicted the wound on
Amfortas.
If, besides Parsifal, Gawan plays in Wolfram an important part as
representative of secular chivalry, and allies himself precisely with Klingsor
and the latter's seductive confederate Orgeluse, and if, mingled with this, all
sorts of suggestions of enchanted flowers, chaplets and names of flowers act a
part9, which suggestions, moreover, are also not lacking in the love-adventure
of the king of the Grail himself; Wagner has condensed all this and developed it
in regard to his own hero Parsifal, who, as we know, is mentioned in Wolfram as
a predecessor of Gawan's who had rejected Orgeluse's love, and has in this way
invested the temptation of the fool driven by pagan sensuality out into the
world with a simple dramatic form, which, moreover, coincides in all its
individual features with cognate vestiges of tradition. Orgeluse, the seducer,
is, besides, identified by him with Kundry, the blasphemous messenger of the
Grail, as mistress of Klingsor's flower-spirits.
Kundry in Wagner is the
most interesting delineation of character which the poet found to take in hand
for his drama. In this form are united almost all the personifications of the
womanly element which appear, in the epical settings of the legendary material,
multifariously divided according to their intrinsic law. All these women of the
relevant poems may be traced back to an originally homogeneous mythical
formation, viz.: to the form of the Germanic Valkyræ, and furthermore to the
mother of the gods, wife of the gods, merely multiplying themselves again in the
Valkyræ. Kundry appears in all the relevant legends like a Valkyr10, and
therefore also now as hostile, now as helping, healing. Thus she represents the
two sides of womanly nature, which the ancient German had mythically personated
in his combating and slaying, protecting and fostering Valkyræ. In all the
legends she curses the hero and then removes the curse from him or benevolently
declares to him his fault, in doing which she shows herself (for instance, in
the Mabinogi) transformed into a beautiful young man. Wagner has poetized this
twofold character into a dramatic motive, in that he has furthermore identified
Kundry with the Herodias of the German legend. Herodias, too, is a
Valkyr-figure, a Dame Hera or Herke, a storm-spirit ever roaming restlessly
through the world; and in this is founded her affinity with Kundry, the wild
horsewoman of the Grail, whose name (in the northern language Gundryggia) is to
be found, moreover, in the Edda 11 as denoting the office of the Valkyræ, to
make ready for battle. Herodias is said to have laughed, when she bore the head
of John the Baptist on the charger; thereupon the bloody head blew upon her, so
that she has been ever since condemned to everlasting vagrancy; thus she became
changed into the female Ahasuerus, a consort of the Wild Huntsman, of
Hackelberg, i.e. pall-bearer, Wotan as God of the tempest and of the dead. This
demoniacal alliance exists, in Wagner, between Kundry and the magician Klingsor,
whose Gaelic counterpart bears the name Gwyddao12, i.e. Gwodan, Wotan.
Just as
the bloody head of the Gaelic form of [the] legend becomes, in the Grail-
legend, the symbol of the suffering Saviour himself, i.e. the Grail, so,
according to Wagner's interpretation, did Kundry not mock the head of John the
Baptist but the cross-bearing Christ himself; thereupon his glance struck her,
and now, condemned to "accursed laughter", she wanders through the world in
despair to find the Saviour again, that he may through love redeem her from the
curse. Thus she desires to do penance in good works, as in the service of the
Grail; but the curse of her sin continually impels her anew to evil.
The
representative of paganism, the sworn enemy of Christ and of his saints,
Klingsor, secured against her seduction by his own infamy alone, has power over
her in the magic sleep of her exhaustion and, having transformed her into a
wonderfully beautiful woman, forces her into his service to cause the dangerous
and seductive side of feminality, the power of pagan sensuality, to operate for
the corruption of the knights of the Grail. Thus has she seduced Amfortas; but
Parsifal, the innocent one, resists her. Out of her desperate longing for
redemption through love, the unhappy wretch seeks, in the very seduction which
her beauty must demoniacally perpetrate, the enjoyment of the divinely rescuing
love for which her accursed nature is striving. The only one, Parsifal, who has
become conscious in the true love of sympathy, perceives the insane mistake of
this longing, and tears himself away from her embrace. For this, the rejected
one lays upon him the curse of going astray; but Klingsor's power also is broken
through the victory of purity, and the spear is in Parsifal's hand. Kundry,
freed from her diabolic master, seeks, humbly penitent, the service of the
Grail; and when Parsifal also returns to its sacred domain, the ever-laughing
one weeps during the benediction of baptism at the affectionate hand of its new
king. Thus the Christian power of redemption is bestowed upon the unhappy woman
also. The redeemed woman dies in the sunshine of the grace of God; but the
redeemed knights, strengthened by the light of the newly revealed Grail,
continue to do the works of healing and charity of pure Christianity in the
service of the holy shrine of divine love delivered from the calamity of
guilt.
Clearly Wolzogen means here Sabaism or Sabianism, the
worship of angels, which should not be confused with Sabeism, the faith of a
sect that practised baptism. (Editor).
A German word, now
obsolete, which may be rendered by a word like "Templists".
(Translator).
Here Wolzogen errs. The bloody lance was not
identified as the spear of Longinus by Chrétien but this identification was made
in the First Continuation to the unfinished poem.
See the English translation on
page 132. The absence of this identification in Wolfram's poem suggests that,
although he knew Perceval, he did not know the First Continuation.
(Editor).
It is far from certain that the story of Peredur, of
which the earliest written version dates from about 1325, predates Chrétien's
poem, left unfinished in 1190. (Editor).
I.e. in each of these
accounts, variously as Peredur, Perceval or Parzival. (Editor).
The reader will understand that here Wolzogen turns the matter on its head.
Chrétien and Wolfram divide nothing, for their tutor and hermit are entirely
separate characters. It was Wagner who combined them into a single character,
his Gurnemanz. (Editor).
Once again, Wolzogen treats the First
Continuation as part of Chrétien's poem. He overlooks a significant difference:
the hero of the First Continuation, who mends the broken sword, is Gawain. See
the English translation on page 131. (Editor).
In his article
Erlösung dem Erlöser (in the Blätter of 1890, pages 341-45), Wolzogen calls the
Grail, das heiligste Symbol der Erlösung and interprets the concluding phrase of
the work as meaning that Parsifal releases the Grail. (Editor).
Wolzogen does not make a convincing case for the origin of the Magic Flowers in
Wolfram's poem. It is beyond any doubt that Wagner found his inspiration for
them elsewhere. (Editor).
To the extent that a hag riding on a
mule resembles a valkyrie. (Editor).
The word "Gundryggia" does
not, in fact, appear in the Edda either as name or title. The name "Gunn"
(battle) does appear, however, as that of a Valkyrie who rides with Wotan.
(Editor).
The Celtic magician is better known as Gwydion. The
hypothesis that he was originally a Celtic deity has not been established with
any certainty. Gwydion appears in the Mabinogi as a shapeshifter, which provides
a link with Wotan, albeit a weak one. (Editor).
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